Boeing zaps PCs using CHAMP missile microwave attacks Boeing has successfully conducted a test of a missile capable of blasting a building's electronics with an energy beam without harming the structure itself. The era of EMP weapons has arrived it seems. The Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) is an air-launched device that uses a high-powered …
I've seen massive EM pulses.
They were big enough to split 1 meter diameter poles.
I've heard about a theory that such EM fields can power localized time travel, with a specialized no-longer-available vehicle with a rare exposed corrosion resistant alloy skin. Although it has to be traveling at exactly 88 MPH when the pulse hits.
Yes these massive pulses don't see to cause the end of civilization as we know it. Specifically, they don't destroy equipment that is designed to withstand EM pulses. So you take out their microwave oven, depriving them of popcorn, but the equipment you would like to destroy likely continues to run.
Lightning is kids stuff compared to an EMP.
It's all about the rise-time of induced voltages in wiring and PCB traces.
Back in the day stopping such fast rise-time induced voltage pulses from destroying electronics was beyond the clamping devices available, now not so much of a problem with fancy semiconductors.
The Boeing guy himself said "When that computer went out" not "computers", the computers in the previous shot were said to be in an earlier test, maybe a non-airborne EMP device.
"I suppose it would be handy in situations where you want to kill a crowd's mobile communications without taking out the network."
This will fry *any* electronic equipment in range.
That *includes* the cell tower electronics, including the RF receiver side. The transmitter side, being used to higher powers *might* survive.
I think in the US law enforcement just request the telcos to suspend service or use a jammer.
I was looking at the video with that in mind.
There's this conic EMP ray of destruction, yet it hits a rectangular building and evenly destroys all inside leaving all outside untouched? I severely doubt it. Collateral damage will include street equipment like traffic lights, BT's green boxes full of switchgear, cars, the more sensitive equipment in a large radius around; and the more robust equipment inside will still work.
Not sure if a pacemaker is in the more or less robust category.
> That's not really giving the Kalashnikov much credit.
Ooh, ooh, ooh; want to learn how to defend yourself against Kalashnikovs, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you, eh? Well let me tell you something my lad! When you're walking home tonight and some great homicidal maniac comes after YOU with a bunch of loganberries, don't come cryin' to me!
Vic.
...... which are Proven Clone Drones/Phish Phorms
Hmmm ..... Seems to me like CHAOSystems, with their CodedD XSSXXXX NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive IT Bases and AIMagical Mystery Turing Machine Programs/Global Operating Device Instruction Sets ........ are a Quantum Defence Leap which renders ....... well, it would not be wrong to say and advise/reveal and speculate, quite surreal virtual and sublime real protection both against and for such Zippy Zapping Phantom Works.
And that would make Clouds Hosting Advanced Operating Systems both valuable and invaluable and expensive and priceless for those with a need to know of the methodology that feeds and seeds/plants and harvests AIDefinite Future Vision ........ SMARTR HyperVision ..... Virtually Mentored with Remote Monitoring of Advanced Intelligence and CyberIntelAIgents.
Chain mail would be. A modern implementation thereof would use a lightweight metal rather than Iron (Aluminium or Titanium alloys). If one wasn't interested in protection from bladed weapons, knitwear made with fine copper wire would suffice (something any self-respecting anarchist's granny could knock up in a few hours).
Wouldn't have worked, either. Inverse squares. There would be a large perimeter within which the people would have suffered a large radiation dose and would know that they'd be dead within a month. For a few days, though, they'd be alive, active, angry. Knowing their inevitable fate they would become pretty much the ultimate suicide warriors.
I hope it was the inhumanity that was the reason these weapons weren't persued, rather than the above.
Not really, they were designed to extend the lethal radius against armoured vehicles for tactical nuclear weapons.
Reason being, a tank is quite a good place to be (in comparison to lots of other alternatives) when nuclear devices are going off nearby, the thick metal armour is good at protecting against the blast and radiation.
The lethality could of course be increased by increasing the TNT-equivalent tonnage - but the engineers involved were already trying that, so the only way of increasing tonnage was to increase the size of the warhead, which meant you'd need bigger missiles, aircraft, artillery etc.
They discovered, however, they could increase the amount of neutrons emitted (this previously hadn't been a design goal, so there was room for improvement). The reason neutrons are dangerous to tank crews is that they make material they hit radioactive as well. The tank would then be a piece of dangerous nuclear waste, even if it had protected its occupants from the blast.
The thing to remember, is that this would still be an honest-to-goodness nuclear weapon, with plenty of explosive power; it certainly wouldn't "leave everything else intact".
So, then you have a radioactive tank containing a tank crew knowing they have less than a month left to live. My comment about ultimate suicide warriors stands, except they are also well-armed and well-protected. Of course, I'm assuming that the opposition would be smart enough to realize that you have to keep your heavy armour dispersed, rather than all gathered together in a small area.
I think even Ghadaffi knew that. The problem is now solved with laser-guided conventional bombs, rather than nukes. Dunno what they can do to counter that. Better camouflage? Advance planning, plant lots of small forests so there's always tree cover handy? Hey, that's a good idea - make being "green" a military imperative!
Just how far back from the target do your own forces need to be, in order for your own forces equipment NOT to suffer the same fate as the intended target...?
....Or have Boeing also come up with a convenient range of Microwave EMP hardened electronic equipments, (for 'own forces use only, of course) too?
Well, yes and no. The Farraday cage protects from the immediate burst but you can still suffer damage to your kit from induced spikes in any conductors penetrating your cage (like copper power cables from the mains). The spike, if big enough, can still jump the airgap in your fusebox and damage systems connected to the mains supply. One of the fun bits of EMP-proofing datacenters is you have to have the backup generators inside an extension of the cage with you or they just provide a big hole for the spike to kick through your cage.
one could just have a sufficiently thick shielding, although not knowing the intensity or energy (wavelength, I'm a KeV kinda guy) of the radiation who knows how thick it'd need to be (or how much cooling would be required to prevent having molten metal covering valuable electronics) ....
aren't most servers housed in basements anyways?
"The Farraday cage protects from the immediate burst but you can still suffer damage to your kit from induced spikes in any conductors penetrating your cage "
But you then go onto talk about EMP-ing datacentres. If people can do that, then surely there's no big hairy deal in proofing your telephone exchanges and military kit, at which point this becomes the ultimate anti-Play Station weapon? Military IT kit used to be Tempest-ed thirty years ago, which was largely about preventing interception, but it wouldn't take much to address the probable mains spiking surely?
".....If people can do that, then surely there's no big hairy deal in proofing your telephone exchanges and military kit...." Yes, but it's a matter of expense. A datacenter can be easily designed to take into account EMP attacks and is usually a one-off expense. Suppose you want to EMP-proof the infrastructure for just London, then that's literally thousands of buildings, telecoms cabinets, underground cabling and overhead lines that need to be shielded. Many of those buildings were not designed for EMP-proofing and will require considerable alterations. Offset that against the cost of a single high-altitude nuke burst (the good old way of making EMP attacks) and you soon realise the cost is the main factor in stopping large-scale EMP-proofing. And then a single high-altitude bomb could knock out most of the electronics in Europe.... The only problem for the attacker with the high-altitude nuke option is it would trigger a retaliatory nuke strike. The missile makes it not only a cheaper attack but also a politically acceptable one, but if you are the defender and have a lot of buildings then the cost is still the same as when you were protecting against the old threat.
That's not to say the British Government may have allegedly paid 3M to design some truck-sized anti-static bags for slapping over important kit in the field as a last resort....
/Kaaah-bloooooie, obvioulsy.
There have been reports of U.S. military using such missiles a decade ago... There's even a scientific journal (I don't remember which one) that told how such a missile work. It's basically an explosive cylinder surrounded by a big coil with a tiny air gap between the coil and the cylinder. Upon detonation, a big capacitor is discharged in the coil, creating an intense magnetic field. A few milliseconds later, the explosive is detonated at one end of the cylinder. The explosion travel through the cylinder, expanding (exploding) the cylinder in a linear manner. This shorts the coil from one end to the other end rapidly. The magnetic energy then get concentrated up to the tip of the coil where all the energy is then discharged over a very tiny area. This create a massive microwave electromagnetic pulse that is directed with a special shaped cone toward the target.
Of course, this is a one-time use, but it can blast many electronics in a narrow cone. The missile explode in mid-air, causing little or no collateral damage.
I once read an account of how an electronics engineer fought back against the yob who moved in next door and subjected him to loud music 24 hours/day. He built an EMP generator and repeatedly took out the yob's audio system through the wall. Eventually the yob decided that the place was jinxed and moved out. I guess inverse squares makes it far easier to do that at a range of just a few feet.
If it was a hoax, it was a well-written one. It was, of course, posted anonymously, since it's illegal to do this.
Maybe they took the opportunity to test EMPs as well.
What was well-reported was the use of carbon monofilament wires to short-circuit electricity transmission lines. That was extremely effective. it's amazing how much electricity a carbon-fibre wire can pass before it gets hot enough to turn into CO2. The resulting spikes and surges on the electricity grid may well have been mistaken for EMP activity.
I have no idea what WW3 will be fought with, but I'm sure WW4 will be fought with stones.
It's not so much the current the carbon filament passes, but the track of conductive carbon particles it creates as it disintegrates. Thus you create optimum conditions for the system to "flash over", with the resulting arc creating a plasma path that will keep the arc going until <something> gives in - that something usually being the upstream protection.
Once you've tripped all the circuits, you give the network operators "something of a headache" sorting out what's tripped for what reason and how to turn it all back on.
The claimed theory is that it'll trip everything but not cause any damage - so once you've kicked out the nasty guy that's not selling you oil cheaply enough, it can all be switched back on. However, I've heard reports that the process coats the insulators with a fine layer of carbon deposits which then cause flashovers - thus meaning you have to replace all the insulators before the system can be brought back online, ie not the "non-damaging" weapon it's claimed to be.
For some fun, take a look at the Arcs n Sparks page here :
http://205.243.100.155/frames/longarc.htm
In particular, scroll down to "480 volt 3-phase Arc Flash Demonstration" to see how once initiated (in that case with a strand of thin copper wire), an arc can be maintained with a fairly low voltage if there is enough energy behind it.
Yeah, it's called an Explosively-Pumped Flux Compression Generator - the Russians and the Americans started playing with them back in the 50's as I recall. Not only is the power from the capacitor converted into magnetic flux, but the explosive chemical energy of the blast is as well to some extent, as it does work compressing the flux as it shorts out the coil. Depending on how you set them up the resulting EMP blast can be omni-directional or focussed - and the big ones can also kill people if they are close enough.
Fibre optics and faraday cages. Job done. That's the TEMPEST programme in a nutshell. Nominally about eavesdropping prevention, but also extremely convenient for EMP resistance. Three decades or so ago,so it needs to be reinvented round about now.
Or, alternatively, use valves (vacuum tubes) not semiconductors. Like everyone was astounded to find in that Russian fighter whose name I forget.
More PR for the US military pork barrel.
"I have no idea what WW3 will be fought with, but I'm sure WW4 will be fought with stones."
WW3 is in progress at the moment, the dollar is the weapon, and the Chinese are winning.
"Or, alternatively, use valves (vacuum tubes) not semiconductors. Like everyone was astounded to find in that Russian fighter whose name I forget."
that reminded me of the astronaut showing his soviet counterpart one of the special ballpoint pens NASA developed, at huge expense, that worked in zero-g. when the cosmonaut looked unimpressed, the american asked how they had solved the problem. "we use a pencil".
The pen/pencil thing is a hoax. IIRC, the pen company developed it themselves and offered it to NASA at no charge, and writing with pencils is indeed a bad idea. The Russians just had their priorities leaning more towards "fast and cheap" and less towards, "keeps cosmonauts alive". There's some pretty horrible documentation about an incident in which a cosmonaut was forced to fly a capsule he knew was defective; as it re-entered the atmosphere (unscheduled) he was heard on the radio screaming something along the lines of, "You bastards killed me!"
No ticker tape parade for hin... Unless you count his being the confetti personally...
I notice that all the monitors fall over simultaneously, but one PC seems to survive - until the monitor switches off again, then signal seem sto be lost.
But there is not a flicker from the lights.
This looks like they managed to interrupt the power supply, rather than the machines themselves...
Vic.
I saw a specification for a high powered pulsed UHF transmitter test 'warehouse'. The main features were that the foil backed dry wall / gypsum panels had to be bonded and areas around the joints and corners covered with 'chicken wire' of certain dimensions. All services, which included water pipes, were also bonded and passed through ferrites.
If these protections can contain a signal, they can equally protect from such signals, IMO.
With respect to American military tests, many in the past have been questioned, especially when the senior officer n charge of projects was, later, hired by the contractor. Boeing has had lots of projects prove unsuccessful after detailed Congressional investigation.
The question what were the attacked buildings constructed from - woos, brick or concrete?
Hell, Boeing couldn't even build a 'high tech' fence designed to stop illegal immigrants from Mexico.
looks like this setup would be excellent against civilian-grade hardware. but as previous posters mentioned, probably not as good against anything remotely hardened or shielded.
suddenly "the Cloud" doesn't sound so good for important data does it? Hopefully no one who's upset the Government happens to house their "cloud" services the same place you do...
NWO conspiracy theorists get your HERF shielding tinfoil hats ready.
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